Gaming company There has an ambitious project of developing a virtual Earth for use by gamers. An even more ambitious project has been handed to There by the U.S. Army. The Army has asked There to create a virtual Earth from a real-world terrain database in true scale. The virtual Earth will model real world physics and have a multi-user persistent environment, according to Robert Gehorsam, There's Vice President of Strategic Initiatives.

Instead of simply simulating battles, the virtual Earth is being set up to allow the Army to simulate other things, such as intelligence gathering and logistics planning. U.S. Army researchers are working with There to ensure proper physical characteristics and reactions by objects and people, including crowds and indigenous populations.

The first completed version of the virtual Earth is slated for September.

BRIAN'S OPINION
There will definitely gain a unique insight into the knowledge of U.S. Army researchers as it pertains to terrain and the modeling of objects. Surely that knowledge will make it into the same virtual Earth that There is working on for gamers, unless there are some things that cannot be included because of national security.

I was a little taken aback by the notion that There will be able to complete the first version by September. I've worked on much smaller projects and they didn't have nearly the ambitious timeframe that There has. This is an incredible timeframe considering that the virtual Earth will be in true scale. Perhaps a lot of the footwork is already done and it is simply a matter of allowing time for computers to crunch out all of the calculations necessary to draw the detail needed by the U.S. Army.

Perhaps the Army will allow the virtual Earth to be used on Navy submarines as part of a poor man's holodeck. Sailors could take virtual leave to anywhere on the globe.

Harsh Realm(9:58am EST Tue Feb 24 2004)Sounds like the Chris Carter tv show Harsh Realm, only a matter of time and tech before we can jack in and have a second life. That is assuming I have one to begin with. – by qwijybo

Should be easier then you think…(10:07am EST Tue Feb 24 2004)

Remember the multi-terabytes that NASA collected for the US military using the shuttle or a special satelite that used Radar to create a super-high resolution mapping of the entire surface of the Earth?

This project just might use that data and stitch it all together.– by Rug

Resolution vs. Scale(10:13am EST Tue Feb 24 2004)1:1 scale only means a 40ft. tall building will still be 40ft. tall in the sim. Resolution is much more important when measuring how detailed a simulation like this is. For example, if the resolution is 6 inches then objects smaller than that are not represented. Will it be 1 foot, 6 inches, 2 inches? The screenshot on the BBC page looks like it'll be a few inches.

By the way, the US Army has had stuff like this for years although at pretty low resolutions (I remember stuff with a 5 meter resolution back in the early 90s). I also think it's unlikely they'll do the *entire* earth as there's just too much dead space that is of no interest. Think “middle of the ocean” and “Antarctica”. – by JRink

Cool(11:00am EST Tue Feb 24 2004)I think it'll open a lot of new doors in gaming. We should embrace this idea – by Pea-Tear-Griffin

Gamers, The First to Go(11:16am EST Tue Feb 24 2004)I think that most hardcore gamers would gladly upload their consciousness into a computer if there were some women in there. And that's who “they” will use to control the super Robots that will destroy the world!!! – by Doomsday Prophet

wow(11:31am EST Tue Feb 24 2004)doomsday prophet.. great post! did you think of that all by yourself. i mean it is just so original – by blah

Try There(12:37pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)Everyone should just go to the There website and try the game out. The physics and terrain are very realistic. – by Here

ha (12:39pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)it will be bigger than everquest.. damb if you just started walking in real time it would take forever to get anywere..that would suck. now if they could populate it with 6 billion avitars or sprites, it would be a nice addition to DOOM or Some other FPS – by FRee-K

heh(12:41pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)Seems awesome! – by Camping_carl

/|(12:46pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)What is they had radar shaped like that, then you could triangulate a 3d map. I don't think they do that, right now it's just one straight down, I think. – by myhellokitty

september? of what 2010?(12:56pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)As a game developer myself, i can see them completing the terrain parts of it by September this year with the help of the Army. But there is no way they would be able to accurately model every city, and every town of every nation in the world in that time period. It will take them many years to complete this, I guarantee you. – by Cliff

huge(1:34pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)I guess this baby is not going to fix on a dvd :[ – by jac

who really cares?(1:42pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)none of you will be able to afford it – by Sex

Re:Cliff(1:44pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)If they are going for the whole world, they probley aren't modeling by hand, probley doing somthing so the computer does it all, because it would be to much to do by hand. Probley somthing with elevation maps and photomaps. – by myhellokitty

nice…(2:26pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)They could use it for a reference to see where bin Laden is in his videos.

No, we can't afford it yet, but then of course back in 1980 we couldnt afford a large processor either.

Things change.Bring on the virtual hoochie mama's.Drink a virtual beer, get virtually laid. – by theToad

similar databases already exist(4:26pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)for aviation. They display things like mountains you are about to fly into and are extremely useful for flying through clouds.

The complexity lies in what resolution do you want. For aviation resolution smaller than a few airplane widths (100ft or so) is not needed. I suspect these guys want GPS guided bomb resolutions which are on the order of a few feet, not 100 feet.

We have several radar elevation mapping satalites which are capable of measuring a few feet of position. They use them mainly for studying the movement of fault lines and tidal changes over time. I would be surprised if the USGS database isn't pretty close to what they want right now. This is also how they make those neet Mars topomaps, it's not as wizbang as it sounds.

Also, mapping and entire cities elevation points using radar isn't any harder than doing the same for a mountain range. It's when you want to overlay color for windows, doors, and info like street names that the amount of data goes crazy. That's a completely different problem.

Dividing the earths surface into square feet and adding an elevation for each square is a fixed amount of data, regardles of what's sitting on a square foot. Smart bombs could care less what color or textured bitmap or street info one might overlay on the underlying topomap. They just want a 3D coordinate with as fine a resolution as possible.

– by EE/pilot

Hmmmm(6:46pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)This would make a great online game, start out as a citizen and work your way up to the top in your country, and go fight other countries! – by Headley

Who owns it?(7:24pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)Since taxpayer dollars are paying for it, will the government own the rights? Or will There get to keep the rights (as is often the case when the government hires a contractor to do custom programming)? If the latter, then it's just one more boondoggle. – by Taxpayer

Process this!(9:31pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)I wonder what kind of computer setup they have to process all that data…

I think a project like this is very cool and with a few decades it could develop into a very realistic model.

However, as cool as it sounds I don't see the benefits of such a project to humankind – other than a tool to better control or wage war on people. – by Wally

RE: Doomsday Prophet(11:04pm EST Tue Feb 24 2004)“I think that most hardcore gamers would gladly upload their consciousness into a computer if there were some women in there. And that's who “they” will use to control the super Robots that will destroy the world!!!”

…so what, are we going to hump the world to death? I guess i don't see relation between “women” and “super robots”….If anybody can explain how thats gonna work lemme know, i don't want to wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning with some “super robot” trying to have sex with me…well, msybe if it was a “female super robot” that would rock…hehehe…this is mind boggling. – by Jack Handy

earth=colon(12:37am EST Wed Feb 25 2004) I am a modeler/animator for a med-ad production studio. My team and I spent 4 months modeling the inside of the colon! – by Anim8

wtf is There(2:29am EST Wed Feb 25 2004)who heard of There before I'm sure there are other companies that will do a much better job is asked by the DoD i exchanbge for a sufficient amount of $ . – by dessaix

seriosly tho, it sounds like a great idea for training troops before arriving in the theatre of operations and maybe even ultimately leveling the home-field-advantage.– by exps2player…

Re: Anim8(2:01pm EST Wed Feb 25 2004)How did you gather the data for the modelling? No, wait, I don't want to know after all…. (joke!) – by JRink

PORN!(5:23pm EST Wed Feb 25 2004)Think of all the virtual porn stands you'll be able to access in this virtual Earth… ooooh baby… – by …

Mirror Worlds(3:14pm EST Thu Mar 04 2004)Might want to check out “Mirror Worlds: The Day Software Put the Universe in a Shoe Box: How it Will Happen and What it Will Mean” by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter.

You may also like the Urban Tapestries project in London and Wavemarket in California, which let people do geoblogging and public authorship, tagging and searching real spaces with web content–a precursor, like the Earth project, to mixed reality. – by TheUnaHugger